Hockey

As a proud Canadian, I've been remiss in my patriotic duty in not even knowing which teams are in the Stanley Cup Finals, or even knowing when the final series starts. Well, imagine my surprise while channel surfing yesterday and coming across the start of the first game of the series between the Ottawa Senators and the Anaheim Mighty Ducks. In high definition no less! I watched the first period and the final period, and it was actually pretty good hockey. Anaheim won 3-2, scoring the winning goal with only a few minutes left in the game. Now that I know that the series is on, I might even watch a few more games. For those of you on American cable systems, the games are shown on the Versus network, channels 34 and 665 (HD) on Comcast in Seattle.

I spent a good chunk of an absolutely glorious day touching up the exterior woodwork on my boat. I'll finish it up tomorrow and then try waxing the hull. There's a lot of real estate on the boat, and I suspect it will take me a couple of days to get it done, but I'll give it a try. If all else fails, I can pay someone $600 to do it for me. Assuming my handiwork turns out OK, my next post may include photos.

A few updates....

• My no smoking plan is going pretty well. No tobacco at all for over two weeks now, and no voices from god (or whoever the jerk was a year ago) commanding me to buy a pack of smokes.
• I talked briefly with Hal last night. He made it to LA without any more motorcycle maintenance issues. He's going to stay with his Mom for a few days, and probably won't be back in Seattle for another 8-10 days.
• My Mom is in hospital, and doing quite well after surgery to remove the colostomy she's been living with for the last six months. Let's all hope that this is the end of medical procedures for the old girl. She's had more than her fair share in the last couple of years.

Blake Island and Tacoma

A good time was had by all at what may well become the annual Blake Island Clambake, or maybe more appropriately the Blake Island Seafood Boil. A half-dozen boats and crew showed up, bringing clams, mussels, shrimp, potatoes, and corn. My turkey deep-fryer performed admirably well as a seafood boiler.

Here's Rita showing off a small sample of the food we had.

The weather was perfect. Even Mt. Rainier showed up at our party! Here's some of the crowd on a walk on the beach just after a lovely sunset.

Then it was on to Tacoma, a city often derided by long-time Washington residents as the ugly step-sister of the Puget Sound. Tacoma has a reputation as a grimy run-down industrial port city with high crime and high aroma (from the pulp mill). But there is hope. Over the last few years, the city fathers have been upgrading the image by cleaning up the Foss Waterway and rejuvenating the downtown area. We stayed in a brand-new marina a short walk from the UW Tacoma campus, the Museum of Glass, and downtown. Tacoma has some built-in obstacles to a truly major overhaul, like the freeway that runs between the water and the downtown, and a very busy main rail line a half mile away. I think the planners have done a great job with what they have to work with.

This is affectionately known to the locals as "The Volcano." It is part of the Museum of Glass. It's not exactly the Sydney Opera House, but I think it is pretty cool.

Even cooler is the pedestrian bridge across the freeway. This is part of the view a pedestrian sees if he looks up while crossing the bridge.

Another thing that Tacoma has going for it is that real estate prices aren't as outrageous as Seattle's. I have read articles about how Tacoma's artistic community is flourishing and growing because Seattle area artists are moving there to escape the high prices of Seattle.

I finished To Live's to Fly on this trip. It's an alright book, but I think you have to be a dedicated Townes Van Zandt fan (and I'm only semi-dedicated) to really get into the true story of a tortured genius who created some fabulous music while living an outrageously self-destructive lifestyle. I read it all .... out of kindness, I suppose.

Best Laid Plans

Good news and bad news....The good news is that I didn't bleed (much) yesterday when I installed a water flow sensor on the line feeding the shaft seal on my boat. The bad news is that my best laid plans didn't work. As it turns out, I need sensors that work at lower flow rates than the ones I bought. So I returned them and bought more sensitive ones on-line. I'll try the installation again next week.

Today I'm off to Blake Island and then on to Tacoma with the SSYC crowd. I'm bringing along my 10 gallon pot and propane burner for a clam/crab/mussel/shrimp boil tonight at Blake Island. The weather forecast is good, there will be lots of food and drink and good people to enjoy it all with.

It's a hard life, but someone's got to live it!

The Democrats Have No Balls

Once again the Democrats have proven they have no balls. They've dropped their demand for a timeline for an exit from Iraq from a bill funding the war. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/22/AR2007052201329.html?hpid=topnews
Even when they won a majority (albeit slim) in the House and the Senate based largely on opposition to the war, they can't get past their fears of appearing weak on defense and not supporting the troops. They could argue the case purely on economic grounds. On last night's News Hour, there was a truly scary piece on the true cost of the war http://www-tc.pbs.org/newshour/rss/media/2007/05/22/20070522_warcost28.mp3
When all the costs are calculated, it's easy to come up with costs of $2 trillion dollars or more. That's over $6000 for every man, woman, and child in the US. Does that horrendous cost made anyone safer or even feel safer? As I noted in my last post, there's not much bang for the buck.

Jerry Falwell was buried yesterday. It would have been better if his theology was buried with him. If I believed in Hell, I'd hope he was burning in it, or if there is a god, that when (s)he greeted Jerry at the pearly gates, (s)he was a super-butch lesbian surrounded by a bevy of flaming drag queen angels.

WaveGuide update....My boat is back in its home slip and has been pronounced fixed, but no one has been able to tell me why the shaft bearing/seal failed in the first place. So needless to say, I'll be worrying about when it will fail again. Yesterday I spent a good chunk of the day chasing down a couple of inline flow switches that will set off an alarm if water flow to the seals fail. I'll install them today and see how it works. A full report with photos, and possibly blood but no sex, to follow.....

Bang for the Buck

This is a column by Nicholas Kristof from today's New York Times. Normally, I'd just link to the column, but in their infinite wisdom, the NYT has put their columnists behind a wall that requires a paid subscription to get past. I subscribed a couple of years ago at the super-discounted student rates, and they haven't asked for any more money since, so I'll enjoy it until they catch up with me.

Kristof brings up most of the points I bring up in my conversations with people about the American health care system, so he must be a pretty smart guy. The bottom line is that the US spends far more per capita on health care than any other country in the world, but by any statistical measure (life expectancy, infant mortality, etc.), the outcomes are definitely second tier. Not much of a bang for the buck. And yes, Canada and the Western European countries have issues with their healthcare systems, but I'd rather have Canada's screwed up system any day than the American screwed up system.

How’s this for a glimpse into America’s health care mess:

The student winner I’ve chosen to accompany me on a reporting trip to Africa next month is a superb medical school student named Leana Wen. She receives her M.D. this month, and will research health care access this summer at a Washington think tank.
I asked Leana about her health insurance coverage, just in case she catches leprosy on the Africa trip.
“Actually, I was going to become one of the 45 million uninsured for the summer,” she said. “The think tank does not provide insurance for ‘temporary’ employees, and my school did not allow extension of health insurance post-graduation. I still haven’t found a reasonably priced insurance plan for this period.”
Aaaaargh! When a newly minted doctor investigating Americans’ access to medical care has no insurance — then you know that our health care system is truly bankrupt.
Let’s hope that the presidential campaign helps lead us toward a new health care system. John Edwards has set the standard by proposing a serious and detailed plan for national health care reform, and other candidates should follow.
The medical and insurance lobbies have been busy blocking national health care programs since they were first seriously proposed back in the 1920’s — and the result has been millions of premature deaths in this country because of people falling through the cracks. Doctors fighting universal coverage have been saving lives in their day jobs while costing lives with their lobbying.
Over all, a person without insurance is less likely to have diseases diagnosed early, less likely to get routine preventive care — and faces a 25 percent greater chance of dying early.
Americans with good jobs and complex needs receive superb medical care. But a child in Costa Rica born today is expected to live longer than an American child born today.
The U.S. now spends far more on medical care (more than $7,000 per person) than other nations, yet our infant mortality rate, maternal mortality rate and longevity are among the worst in the industrialized world. If we had as good a child mortality rate as France, Germany and Italy, we would save 12,000 children a year.
It is disgraceful that an American mother has almost three times the risk of losing a child as a mother in the Czech Republic. According to a new report from Save the Children, a woman in the U.S. has a 1-in-71 chance of losing a child before his or her fifth birthday.
Some speculate that America’s high infant mortality rate is partly a result of greater honesty about neonatal deaths or of more in vitro fertilizations. But even if those are factors, they don’t explain why a woman is 50 percent more likely to die in childbirth in the U.S. than in Europe.
The existing medical financing system also creates perverse incentives for expensive procedures; that may be why Americans are far more likely than Europeans to get C-sections. Meanwhile, the burden of paying for these second-rate statistical outcomes is crippling American business. By next year, the average Fortune 500 company will spend more on health care than it earns in net income, according to Steve Burd, the head of Safeway. Mr. Burd and other executives have formed the Coalition to Advance Healthcare Reform, creating a corporate constituency for national health reforms.
There’s evidence that the most efficient financing system would be a single-payer structure, such as that found in most Western countries. Some 31 percent of U.S. health spending goes to administration, more than twice the rate in Canada.
So bravo to Physicians for a National Health Program, a group of 14,000 doctors and other health professionals that favors a single-payer system.
But universal coverage is only part of the answer. We also need far greater attention to public health programs focusing on prevention. Two of the most important life-saving health interventions in recent decades weren’t medical at all: the cigarette tax and laws mandating air bags and seat belt use. A national public health campaign on obesity (similar to the one Gov. Mike Huckabee started in Arkansas) should be an essential component of health care reform.
Even if a single-payer system isn’t politically possible right now, universal coverage is feasible through other mechanisms — as Massachusetts has shown. We need to hold the presidential candidates accountable, for universal coverage is an idea whose time came in the 1920s. We should insist we get it before the 2020s.

Weird Bier

As most of you know, I have a love for beer, and will drink and have drunk beer of almost any kind, anywhere. I've drunk ales, lagers, pilsners, porters, stouts, lambics, and even a malty, yeasty pseudo beer called Shake Shake in Lusaka. That's me grimacing and Marian enjoying my discomfort as I sample the gritty brew.

When I was in New Orleans a couple of weeks ago, I had a beer of a type I'd never heard of, a beer from Bamberg, Germany, called rauchbier. Literally, smoke beer. The waitress told me it tasted like drinking bacon, and she wasn't far off. I asked if she had hash browns and egg beer to go along with it. It was interesting stuff, but nothing that you'd want to drink too much of. Anyway, all those memories came back when I read this article about specialty beers in Germany. http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/travel/20beer.html

It might be time for another trip to Germany soon.

Paying the Price

Being on the road for over a month has its price. As well as watching only a couple of hours of TV while I was gone, I read almost nothing. Now that I've caught up on past episodes of The Sopranos, I've got to get back into a regular reading routine. As a result, I went down to Elliot Bay Book Store (no big-box book stores for me!), and bought a bunch of books I've been meaning to read for quite some time, and one book recommended to me by my big sister Marian, whose past recommendations have been great. The books I bought are:

The Looming Tower, Al-Queda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright
The Prince of the Marshes, And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year inIraq, by Rory Stewart
To Live's To Fly, The Ballad of the Late, Great Townes Van Zandt, by Jon Kruth (hat tip to Marian)
The Worst Hard Time, The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan

I've heard several good reviews, both published and word of mouth, about The Looming Tower, and The Prince of the Marshes. I've liked the music of Townes Van Zandt for quite some time, but don't know much about him other than the legends of his privileged birth, hard-charging lifestyle, and premature death. The Worst Hard Time is written by a local Seattle author, and I've heard him interviewed on the local NPR station. I hope he writes as well as he talks.

Stay tuned for book reports.